The present invention relates generally to telephone call processing systems and call center applications. More specifically, the invention relates to a call center information processing system that is capable of processing unstructured voice input from an incoming caller.
Currently, when a caller is connected to a call center agent, only limited information about the purpose of the call is available to the agent. Callers to call centers typically spend considerable time on hold, while waiting to talk to a call center agent. Currently some call center systems may prompt the caller for specific information while the caller is waiting to talk to an agent. The caller may be asked to enter the information by touch-tone response or by voice, which would be then interpreted by an automatic speech recognition system. While this is a step in the right direction, this conventional approach allows only structured information entry. In other words, the user's response is made with respect to a particular question or topic that the call center system knows about in advance. Currently there is no effective way of accepting and using unstructured voice responses from the caller.
The present invention addresses this shortcoming of conventional systems. It supports the reduction of work by call center agents by capturing unstructured voice information from incoming callers. The system has an input port that is adapted for coupling to a call center telephone switch through which unstructured voice input from an incoming caller is received. An automatic speech recognition system, receptive of the unstructured voice input, converts the unstructured voice input into unstructured text data. Then, a semantic categorization system, receptive of the unstructured text data, converts the unstructured text data into structured data. The semantic categorization system can employ a parsing system or a latent semantic analysis system.
The parsing system may utilize local parsers for keywords, which are entered manually or found automatically via latent semantic analysis, for example.
The latent semantic analysis system, used as an alternative to the parsing system, associates the unstructured text data to different keyword categories using a latent semantic analysis engine.
A data management system then receives the structured data and accesses at least one database of supplemental or relational data to form associations between the structured data and the supplemental data. A presentation system communicates with the data management system for providing information to a call center agent based on the structured data, the supplemental data, or both. The presentation system may also be configured to access and supply other data in addition to said structured data and said supplemental data, including, for example, relational data, tabular data, audio/video data, and graphical data.
The data collection phase may occur either before or during the time the caller is connected to a call center agent. Search results are processed to add additional information and this information may be displayed by either visual presentation or audible presentation.
In one presently preferred embodiment the system display provides a running transcript of speech with keywords highlighted. Alternatively, a list of transcribed keywords may be provided, showing the surrounding text to allow the call center agent to understand the context under which the keywords were spoken. The database access allows product or service information relating to keywords found in the caller's speech to be displayed or presented in auditory form on a second audio channel, for example.
As will be more fully explained herein, the call center information system provides a rich mechanism for transferring expertise between call center agents. If a user provides an unstructured request and if the system does know what information to bring up, but the call center agent does, the appropriate database queries identified by the call center agent can be stored along with the transcript of the call. The next time a similar request is spoken, either by the original incoming caller or another caller, the system will bring up relevant information from the call center agent who handled the first call. In this way, the expertise of the call center agent is stored for later use by that agent, or another agent, who may be asked to handle a call of a similar nature.
The system thus has the ability to characterize incoming calls, by parsing and tagging. Parsing (or tagging) may be performed against a set of predetermined keywords. These can be either manually assigned by a system operator, or learned using latent semantic analysis. The system also has the ability to compare an incoming call with prior calls, by finding similar calls using a semantic distance measure.
For a more complete understanding of the invention, its objects and advantages, refer to the remaining specification and to the accompanying drawings.